Page 464 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

442 Saskia Corder and Miriam Meyerhoff

Consequently, the goals of this chapter are two-fold. First, we provide a de-
scription of what communities of practice are. What are their defining charac-
teristics? What excludes certain groups of speakers from being members of a
community of practice? This will serve as an introduction to the concept for
those who are not already familiar with the term, and will re-establish the essen-
tial parameters of discussion for those who are acquainted with it. Part of this
will entail explicit contrast between the community of practice and other, pre-
existing constructs such as the speech community and social networks.
Second, we demonstrate how the community of practice might impact on
studies of intercultural communication. Is it possible to use studies of different
communities of practice to frame questions about intercultural (mis)communi-
cation? Would such studies lend themselves to being transformed into pro-
grammes for intervention or for highlighting best practice in intercultural com-
munication? What generalizations emerge from community of practice-based
research and what limitations are there in the use of the community of practice for
sociolinguistic research, particularly in the field of intercultural communication? 1
The organization of the chapter reflects these interdependent goals. We
begin with a discussion of what communities of practice are and where sociol-
inguistics has borrowed the concept from. We go on to locate communities of
practice in relation to other ways of analysing groups of speakers, focusing on
the importance of speaker agency, the notion of ‘performativity’ and the emerg-
ent nature of speech norms and communicative competence. We provide
examples of research illustrating these points, and suggest ways in which such
research or similar work might be directed more specifically to intercultural
communication research.

2. Definitions

2.1. Culture and intercultural communication
Other papers in this volume are better placed to provide detailed discussion of
how the term culture is used in lay conversation and in academic discourse. We
will be operating with a very loose sense of culture (and hence intercultural
communication) that reflects very closely our interests in the dynamics of inter-
action between speakers and the emergence and (re)negotiation of relationships
through talk.
We will take culture to refer to a way of life shared by a group of people. We
will assume that this way of life consists of cultivated, i.e. learnt, behaviours,
and that these – as well as the experiences that underlie them, and the knowl-
edge or values they are understood to validate – are accumulated over a period
of time and reproduced even as the members of the group might change. In this